Category: digital social theory

This looks like such an important project. I’d love to try and write something, if I hadn’t realised that I’ll never finish my book projects if I don’t stop writing book chapters:

Intersectional Automations: Robotics, AI, Algorithms, and Equity

Edited Collection (Abstracts Due 1 April 2019)

This collection will explore a range of situations where robotics, biotechnological enhancement, artificial intelligence (AI), and algorithmic culture collide with intersectional social justice issues, such as race, class, gender, sexuality, ability and citizenship.

Some call it the 4th industrial revolution (Brinded, 2016; Kaplan, 2015). Robots, AI, and algorithms have grown from their early uptake in some industries (such as robots in manufacturing) to an accelerating presence in other spheres ranging from customer service roles (for example, reception, check-outs, food service, driving) to professional and creative roles previously unheard-of and un-thought-of (for example, expert legal and medical systems, automated journalism, musical and artistic production (Kaplan, 2016; Ramalho, 2017; Hirsch, 2017)). The World Economic Forum warns that “this will lead to a net loss of over 5 million jobs in 15 major developed and emerging economies by 2020” (Brinded, 2016), a serious challenge to ethical labour practices, and potential looming crisis leading some to consider alternative societal models—such as Universal Basic Income (Frase, 2016), or a robot tax (Walker, 2017)—to compensate.

Meanwhile, there is marked evidence that robots, AI, biotechnology, and algorithms are becoming in general and over-top of employment roles more integrated in human societies. Human-machine communication (HMC) has moved from an important yet somewhat-marginal field to lodge itself at the centre of societal workings and visions for the future. From autonomous vehicles (Bowles, 2016), to the algorithmic filtering of search results (Noble, 2018) and social media content (Gillespie, 2018), from online harassment and political boosterism via bots (Dewey, 2016; Woolley, Shorey, & Howard, 2018), to sex robots (Levy, 2007; Danaher & MacArthur, 2017), from ubiquitous AI assistants in our homes and smart devices (Guzman, 2019), to wearable tech that tracks and shares our biometric data (Forlano, 2019) and/or extends our biological capacities (Brooks, 2003; Jones, 2019), such technologies are rapidly mapping themselves onto almost every conceivable realm of human experience.

And yet, there is mounting evidence that the creation and programming of robots, AI, and algorithms, being artifacts of human culture, do not escape that context, sometimes carrying into their computational logics, platforms and/or embodiments stereotypes, biases, exclusions, and other forms of privilege. One can think of True Companion’s Roxxxy sex robots that some argue have personality options based on racist and sexist stereotypes of womenhood, for example the Barely-18 “Young Yoko” and resistant “Frigid Farah” that, as Gildea and Richardson (2017) note, seem to fetishize underage girls and sexual assault. Or you could think of the abandoned Amazon HR algorithm which, after being fed years of resumes and hiring decisions, used computational logic to identify traits that that were historically associated with Amazon hiring decisions, with the view of automating part of the hiring process, and encoded a preexisting sexism from the HR data that showed that applicants with work experience or activities that included the word “Women’s,” or who were educated at all-women colleges, were often not hired (Jones, 2018). Finally, one could contemplate how polities using data aggregation and predictive algorithms to manage and make decisions about social programs, resource allocation, or policing can end up targeting and profiling poor or racialized populations, with occasionally terrifying results—such as any mistake on an online application being interpreted by an automated system as “failure to cooperate” (Eubanks, 2017).

This edited collection will draw an analytical circle around these interconnected and adjacent issues, lending a critical eye to what is at stake due to the automation of aspects of culture. How do equity issues intersect with these fields? Are the pronouncements always already dire, or are there also lines of flight towards more equitable futures in which agentic artefacts and extensions can play an active part? Chapters may address one or multiple equity issues, and submissions that address emergent intersections between them will be given special consideration.

– Issues around the use of deadly autonomous or semi-autonomous robots by the military or non-state actors, such as work surrounding the Campaign Against Killer Robots (e.g., Anderson & Waxman, 2012; Crootof, 2015; Gregory, 2011; Karppi, Bolen, & Granata, 2016).

– The politics and ethics of the singularity (e.g., Korb & Nicholson, 2012) and the future status of robotic and AI workers with respect to labour, citizenship, and human rights—for example, work on Hansen Robotics’ Sophia as Saudi citizen (e.g., Weller, 2017), robotic servitude (e.g., Green, 2016), as well as the rights of humans interacting with AI (e.g., Shepherd, 2019).

– How any of these or other issues are depicted in popular or fringe fictions that contain robotic or AI characters (for example, Humans, Neuromancer, Extant, Westworld, Her, Blade Runner, Ex Machina,Ghost in the Shell, Altered Carbon, Black Mirror, Speak, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Questionable Content, etc.)

My goal is to assemble a collection of exemplary abstracts and then approach some top-tier academic publishers with relevant series.

If interested, please send a 750-word abstract, collection of keywords, and a 150-word bio to the editor, Dr. Nathan Rambukkana (n_rambukkana@complexsingularities.net), by 1 April 2019. Drafts will be due 1 October 2019 and final versions 1 April 2020. Please also email Nathan at the above address if you have any questions and feel free to repost this CFP to your networks.

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“We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them.” — Michel Foucault

This is the memorable phrase which James Williams uses on pg 114 of Stand Out of Our Light to describe proposals that platforms find technical solutions to the problem of ‘fake news’. It punchily conveys the ironic predicament that treating problems of ‘fakeness’ technically, as engineering challenges to be addressed by better calibrating information flow, kicks the can down the road. The only way to do this is to infer standards of reliability from user behaviour when it is the inability of those users to generate binding standards which generates the problem in the first place. Finding technical solutions to ‘fake news’ inevitably operationalises ‘fakeness’ in precisely the consensual terms that prophets of post-truth fulminate against.

A faith in dialogue pervades the academy, sometimes knowingly framed in terms of the potential of dialogue if only we could get it right. This seems obviously misplaced to me and I’d suggest two examples to justify this:

Online dialogue often gets worse with time rather than improving. Misunderstandings multiply, sides get taken and participants polarise. Some dialogues need to be cut short and others shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

Specialised dialogues often get exclusionary with time, trading a collective focus for public marginality. An arcane vocabulary develops to manage interaction, enabling epistem gains while undermining attempts to translate insights into public action.

One of many things I liked about Nervous States was how Will Davies recovered representation as a matter of political ontology. There’s something more fundamental here than how specific representatives operate within specific systems. Political representatives act on behalf of others, depending on representations of those others as they do so. What Žižek conceives of as declining symbolic efficiency means those representations lack the force they once had, with their meaning contested and their implications denied. Davies uses a different vocabulary to analyse this and helps make the notion more concrete than it tends to be in post-Lacanian political theory. Factfulness has begun to break down as an institution, with the capacity of facts to adjudicate arguments and establish consensus in a state of continual decline. Davies offers some extremely specific reasons for this, such as the regionalisation of inequality undermining the plausibility of national statistics, a growing cultural pessimism grounded in physical suffering and social media unravelling the depersonalisation upon which factfulness depends. But he manages to retain the broader horizon of the institution itself breaking down through these many vectors. This combination is why it is such an impressive book.

The problem is that the decline of factualness tends to be self-reinforcing because the tendency of experts to ‘hurl more facts at these disturbances’, as Davies memorably puts it, embodies precisely the feeling which factfulness expressly repudiates. Once the social (dis)order gives you reasons to look for post-factualness, evidence of its inexorability can be found everywhere. It begins to seem that behind every lofty pronouncement of a professional or expert is a self-interested and emotional creature, dressing up their concerns in lofty rhetoric which pretends to speak on behalf of everyone. For all leftists like myself (rightly) seeking to resist the institutionalised cynicism of public choice theory, examples of this suspicion being accurate are nonetheless too widespread to make a categorical denial plausible. I’m not sure I agree with Davies in his characterisation of this in terms of the breakdown of the distinctions between mind/body and peace/war. But thinking with these distinctions has certainly helped him put his finger on an unraveling of which we can see traces all around us yet which resists easy articulation. If we have spent recent years in a ‘pre’ we cannot yet name then understanding this unravelling must be a crucial part of accounting for what comes next.

I was thinking of this when watching The Other Side of Everything, a powerful new film by Mila Turajlic which tells the political story of Serbia through the story of her mother Srbijanka Turajlic and the apartment she was born in. The mathematician Srbijanka was a leading figure in the movement which led to the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević in October 2000. The film shows her caution at the fall of the regime and her sense that it was political responsibility rather than more desirable representation which was necessary to ensure that what came next would prove able to live up the hopes invested in it by the movement which had fought so hard and for so long. I found myself preoccupied by this caution about hope expressed by someone who provoked so much hope in others, itself borne out in the political pessimism which the film explores amidst a modern Serbia in which the current president was Milošević’s minister of information.

Throughout this time Srbijanka lived in an apartment arbitrarily divided at the birth of the communist regime in Yugoslavia, split down the middle by security forces redistributing accommodation and divided by a door which went unopened for decades in spite of the constant availability of the key. The lived experience of representation (or its absence) haunts the film and its political ontology animates it, with Turajlic expertly integrating moving domestic footage, the historical archive and remarkable street scenes to produce a nimble film as visually engaging as it is thoughtful. It left me with a sense of hope in representation being its own undoing, as the expectation that things would change undermined the movement which overthrew Milošević as they took practical action to try and bring this change about. I stress this is a sense, as opposed to an analysis of a hugely complex political history which I’m aware I barely grasp. I look forward to reading analyses of this film from people who understand the events depicted in it much better and more directly than I do.

To get to grips with the political ontology of representation is imperative and I suspect it can be done more directly with art than it can with theory. The unravelling of factualness leaves our vocabulary inadequate for making sense of the discursive predicaments we now confront in political life. Take the example of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (slightly irritating radio 4 profile here) whose election has provoked great hope in the American left. It is a monumental achievement as a 29 year woman, the youngest ever elected to Congress, came from nowhere on a radical left platform regarded as absurd by mainstream political commentators.

There are two extreme reactions to this, what Bourdieu called thought stopping clichés, liable to distort debate through the gravitational force of their own conceptual laziness. On the one hand, the election of Ocasio-Cortez can be greeted with enthusiasm as events encourage the belief that by simply electing new people, the right people, we can bring about the change we seek. On the other hand, her election can be greeted with a cynical sneer that points beyond representation to the system in which those representatives work, inevitably reinforcing and reproducing whatever their personal intentions. The former is naive and likely to produce disillusionment, the latter is cynical in the ideological sense of facilitating passivity while congratulating oneself on seeing through the illusions which bind others. It clearly matters who gets elected and what they promise to stand for but the question is how it matters. Once we turn to actually existing politics, it is much harder to recover the political ontology of representation than it is if we are exploring how we live our lives in a way utterly shaped by representation yet continually disappointed by it. It must ultimately be a collective task but the crowd is a fragile thing and we will alway return back to our lives at some point in the gathering.

It can be hard to take distraction seriously as a political factor because it is rooted in personal life. It tends to be understood as an individual ailment, perhaps significant in someone’s experience of their own life and exercising a diffuse constraint over their effectiveness but nonetheless beyond the bounds of the political. However individuals changes have aggregate consequences for political life. As James Williams puts it in Stand Out of Our Light pg 10:

But I also knew this wasn’t just about me – my deep distractions, my frustrated goals. Because when most people in society use your product, you aren’t just designing users; you’re designing society. But if all of society were to become as distracted in this new, deep way as I was starting to feel, what would that mean? What would be the implications for our shared interests, our common purposes, our collective identities, our politics?

Addressing these questions pushes at the boundaries of a disciplinary separation between psychology and sociology. If we reduce to distraction to a costruct of experimental psychology, we lose track of why our goals and tasks matter to us and the significance of our declining capacity to attend to them. If we approach distraction in a purely sociological way, we over-socialise it and obscure the subtle variability of its development in individuals. Furthermore, it necessitates resisting the evisceration of the human, reclaiming the language of human purposes in the face of attempts to reduce our meaningful action to digital metrics.

as it functions today, ideology appears as its exact opposite, as a radical critique of ideological utopias. The predominant ideology now is not a positive vision of some utopian future but a cynical resignation, an acceptance of how ‘the world really is’, accompanied by a warning that if we want to change it too much, only totalitarian horror will ensue. Every vision of another world is dismissed as ideology. Alain Badiou put it in a wonderful and precise way: the main function of ideological censorship today is not to crush actual resistance –this is the job of repressive state apparatuses –but to crush hope, immediately to denounce every critical project as opening a path at the end of which is something like a gulag. This is what Tony Blair had in mind when he recently asked: ‘Is it possible to define a politics that is what I would call post-ideological?’

Stafford Beer was a leading figure in management cybernetics whose life and work spans a period of intellectual inquiry which draws in the leading figures from the origin of cybernetics through to practical interventions in organisations as diverse as British steel, Warburtons, the Canadian national health system and the Chilean economy under Salvadore Allende. Beer’s work is both polymathic and practical – he was an artist and poet who created machines, wrote childrens’ books and devised new graphical modelling techniques. The work gives us a way of addressing fundamental and ambitious questions about education: How do education systems work? What is teaching? What is conversation? What is the relationship between consciousness and learning?

In this session I will demonstrate the core principles of his approach to cybernetic modelling, from the concepts of “variety management”, “transduction” and “viable systems” to his later experiments with organisational decision-making which he called “syntegration” (documented in his 1994 book “Beyond Dispute”). This will be a practical session where participants will be invited to draw diagrams and explore his ideas using sound, pictures, multimedia and conversation.

There’s an interesting section in Žižek’s Like a Thief in Broad Daylight reflecting on the politics of crowds. Making a similar argument to the recent book by Will Davies, he argues that political crowds involve a rejection of representation. He argues on pg 71 that the presence of crowds seeking political change is literally a rejection of representation, orientared towards representatives:

Popular presence is precisely what the term says –presence as opposed to representation, pressure directed at representative organs of power; it is what defines populism in all its guises, and (as a rule, although not always) it has to rely on a charismatic leader. Examples abound: the crowd outside the Louisiana congress that supported the populist governor Huey Long and assured his victory in a key vote in 1932, crowds exerting pressure on behalf of Milošević in Serbia, crowds persisting for days in Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring demanding the overthrow of Mubarak, crowds in Istanbul during protests against Erdoğan, and so on. In a popular presence, ‘people themselves’ make palpable their force directly and beyond representation, but at the same time they become another mode of being.

As well as often relying on a charismatic leaders, crowds also depend on an organisational apparatus to facilitate and support their gathering, even in the case of apparently spontaneous uprisings. The experience of the crowd can lead this dependence to be disowned, as well as the element of representation involved in any crowd making popular demands. From pg 71-72:

One should never forget that the agent of popular pressure is always a minority –the number of active participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 against global economic equality was much closer to 1 per cent than to the 99 per cent of its slogan.

Reflecting on Trotsky’s observation that people “cannot live for years in an uninterrupted state of high tension and intense activity”, Žižek suggests that there are inherent limits to the political presence of crowds and a need to plan for when life returns to normal. I take his point to be that crowds contain their own negation, representing even as they reject representation and creating the conditions for future representation through their own inherent limits. He frames this provocatively in terms of the necessarily alienating character of political life: a denial that the pure presence of the crowd can ever be sustained.

This argument is made by Razmig Keucheyan in Left Hemisphere: Mapping Contemporary Theory at loc 6004-6028. It’s a thought provoking conclusion to an impressively broad text, even if it leaves me no more enthusiastic about critical social theory than I was at the outset.

However, the globalization of critical thinking possesses the following problematic feature: it is inseparable from its Americanization. The attractiveness of the United States (not merely financial, but also for the promotion and international circulation of oeuvres) is such that, whatever the provenance of thinkers –Latin America, India, China, Africa and so forth –it is difficult for them to resist it. Yet it is likely that the Americanization of critical thinking contains the seeds of its political neutralization.11 The United States is certainly not the political desert it is sometimes depicted as in Europe. Powerful social movements exist there, among them the movement of illegal immigrants of Hispanic origin that has emerged in the recent years. Rather, the problem lies in the situation of universities and their occupants, which tend on account of their elitist character to be socially and spatially cut off from the rest of society. This socio-spatial segregation of American universities renders the interaction between critical thinkers and political and social movements referred to above even less likely. In this respect, what is required is the emergence of a globalization of critical thinking uncoupled from its Americanization.

While there are objections which should be made to how he characterises the “globalization of critical thinking” as something which diffuses outwards from its American and European foundation, I’ve found myself ruminating on his underlying observation of how the wealth and influence of the US system draws the most celebrated representatives of these currents into its orbit. I had found myself wondering a similar thing about internationalisation and academic celebrity: to what extent does the desire to overcome provincialism entrench the intellectual star system and are there ways in which this can be avoided?

Steve Watson (University of Cambridge): The pre-and posthuman limbic system in the accelerated academy

The conference seeks to conceptualise change in contemporary knowledge production in a way that transcends the dichotomy between theoretical frameworks that emphasise the role of humans (e.g. pragmatism, cultural sociology, critical realism, Bourdieusian sociology) and those that seek to dissolve the human and/or focus on non-human actors (actor-network theory, poststructuralism, STS, new materialism, transhumanism). Bringing together scholars in social sciences and humanities whose work engages with relationships between the human, post-human, metrics, and agency in the ‘neoliberal’ university, the conference addresses the methodological implications of how we theorise human agency, the agency of technical systems, and the relationships between them, in order to foster and support critical scholarship and engagement the current (and future) socio-political environment requires.

It is by now widely accepted that the transformation of the structures of governance and funding of higher education and research – including pressures to produce more and faster, and the associated proliferation of instruments of measurement such as citation (‘H’) indexes and rankings – pose serious challenges to the future of the academia. The critique of these trends has mostly taken the form of calls to ‘slow down’, or assertion of the intrinsic value/unquantifiable character of scholarship, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. While these narratives highlight important aspects of academics’ experience of neoliberal restructuring, they often end up reproducing the inter- and intra-disciplinary division between theoretical and interpretative frameworks that foreground human agency (focusing on student movements, working experiences of academics, or decision-making) and those that foreground the performativity of non-human agents (focusing on the role of metrics, indexes, analytics or institutions).

This intellectual fragmentation constrains attempts to study these processes in genuinely interdisciplinary ways. On the rare occasions when meaningful exchange does happen, conceptual, ideological, and institutional fault lines hinder sustained dialogue, often leading to the reassertion of old certainties in lieu of engagement with complex relational, institutional, socio-technical, and political/policy realities of transformation. The conference aims to provide an intellectual and institutional framework that challenges this dichotomy, and seeks to develop ways of thinking that are mutually reinforcing, rather than exclusive. It focuses on the issue of the (post)human as the ontological underpinning to the descriptive and explanatory work needed, as well as the normative horizon for resistance.

This glorious passage by the composer Nico Muhly, reflecting on the different ways in which listeners can engage with the same piece of music, works just as well to describe the possibilities opened up by other forms of cultural design:

What is key for me about creating this sort of emotional and sonic architecture is the possibility of listeners having simultaneous but radically different experiences. Picture a relatively famous church somewhere in Northern Europe: you’ll find tourists there, ticking it off a long list of important sites, being vaguely underwhelmed by the frescoes. You’ll have a local worshipper, lighting a candle for a long deceased relative, you’ll have a verger going about his weekly maintenance, you’ll have a couple whose lifelong fantasy was to see this space in the springtime, you’ll have a Dutch art historian with a spooky and potentially kinky relationship with 16th-century depictions of the Annunciation. The building’s architecture allows each of these simultaneous experiences, and no one of them is more ‘correct’ or well informed or meaningful than the others. With music, I want each listener to feel an intensity inside the music, and I only want to provide a few suggestions about where to look for it.

Agency is always underdetermined by architecture. If designers have the ambition of dictating responses to their work, it will produce unintended consequences as people evade and retreat from their diktats. My hunch is that the underlying logic of the structure and agency question is sound but it needs to be adapted for participatory cultural forms such as these.

I can’t remember when the notion of concept wrangler first occurred to me. I meant it semi-jokingly but the idea of a role in which one would round up, herd or take charge of concepts had a distinctive appeal. It helped articulate a transition in my own intellectual career, as I ceased to see myself as a social theorist despite this being what I was trained to do. Objectively I wasn’t a social theorist, subjectively I didn’t want to be one and yet it was difficult to articulate exactly what it was I was and wanted to be.

The notion of working with concepts in an almost curatorial way worked as a description and inspired me as a motivation. To be a concept wrangler involves organising concepts, bringing them into dialogue with each other, translating across difference. It has a particular value in an accelerating academy, as competitive escalation leads people to publish more and read less. Furthermore, the massification of the academy has led to more people publishing. As Andrew Abbott describes it on pg 34 of his Digital Paper, this alone creates a problem even if we discount the escalatory dynamic which I’m postulating:

As of 2009, half of the dissertations ever written in the history of American academia had been written after 1982, and a third of them since 1995. It is not clear whether output per scholar has increased much, but when the typical discipline numbers ten thousand or more persons, even the old output rates mean that sheer quantity overwhelms us.

He makes the fascinating observation that the “number of references in a typical sociology article has gone up by a factor of two in the last forty years” yet less than 10% of those are for a single page or a specified range in a cited source, as opposed to a figure of two thirds sixty years ago. Formal interconnectedness might have increased but the substance of those connections is evaporating. This produces a terrain in which concept wrangling ought to be a specialised activity, as opposed to being something which everyone does in the normal course of their activity.

To be a concept wrangler is to be drawn towards the space of review essays, panel discussions and think pieces. It involves finding new ways to engage in meta-reflection. It sometimes involves locating old things and at other times involves being sceptical about new things. It can involve loud interventions, sometimes quiet reflection. It involves reading widely while also recognising the limits of one’s own reading. It necessitates drawing on short-form sources in order to make it possible to engage with ideas vastly far from one’s own starting point, while remaining clear about the limits of one’s own expertise. It involves curiosity and creativity. Most of all it involves charity, reading things in the spirit of understanding what someone is trying to say and relate it to what others have already said, rather than to prove a point.

To be a concept wrangler is a gentle yet energetic pursuit and I’d much rather be one than a social theorist.

I find it hard not to wonder how many interactions like this one, satirised so superbly by Silicon Valley, lie behind the tendency of digital elites to pontificate about social trends. On the one hand, data science emerges as a powerful means of generating knowledge of social life, building on past developments while becoming something distinct. On the other hand, a cultural climate which inflates and incentivises self-styled visionaries and thought leaders can imbue vacuous musings with epistemic authority. The organic sociology of Silicon Valley is a strange and complex beast.